Retailing

It is a set of business activities which aims to provide values to the products and the services demanded by the consumers. Global retail today sees lead times as long as 6 to 10 months, forcing vendors to make significant bets on inventory, consumer trends and distribution methods—bloating supply chains with a stockpile of $1.2 trillion in excess merchandise.

At the same time, retailers lose a staggering $93 billion in missed sales every year, simply because they don't have the right products in stock to meet customer demand. And that demand is more demanding and immediate than ever before: in the U.S., over 92% of adults conduct research online and seek the opinions of others before they ever purchase a product from a store.

To do business with shoppers on a smarter planet, retailers and manufacturers need a smarter system. One that bends retail's global supply chain to these new realities. It needs to be inter-connected, so the system can be fed by customer insight at every point in the process—all the way from design to distribution. It needs to be instrumented, so every item of inventory can be tracked and accounted for and it needs to be intelligent, so vast amounts of customer data can be analyzed and turned into real value in real time.